Friday, Jan 01, 2010
Bankers are like trade unionists: only richer:-)
Greg Pytel: Angela Knight: an Arthur Scargill of the British banking
A parallel between downfall of the British industries in the 1980’s and the current state of the banking sector, and the bankers behaving like trade unionists believing that the taxpayers owe them support.
Posted by ant @ 11:27 AM (774 views) Add Comment
21 Comments
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2. devo said...
She's got a face like a smacked ar$e.
3. p. doff said...
I hear she fancies you too Devo.
4. ant said...
Do not become personal: it does not help. Please stick to the merits as I think it is quite interesting article
5. letthemfall said...
For those interested, there is a rather flimsy apologia from AK in the Guardian
6. tpbeta said...
Ant: Are you Greg Pytel?
7. devo said...
3. ant said... Do not become personal: it does not help
I toyed with the idea of launching a debate on the manifestations of psycopathy and ponerology in the actions of the banksters, but decided against it.
8. ant said...
@5 tpbeta: nope. I closely follow his blog. It's pretty good and would like to read more arguments on merits. Either Pytel is correct that the crisis is a result of a massive crimes (called pyramid schemes) and the bankers should be prosecuted (banged up, their wealth confiscated and so on) or Pytel is not correct in his argument. At present the former appears to have been demonstrated convincingly by Pytel. Thus far the latter has not been argued for convincingly enough (including by John Varley, the CEO of Barclays).
My aim is to propagate the Pytel's blog wide enough so anyone from all sides gives his arguments.
9. ant said...
@6 devo: this is a good idea. I have read (somewhere) that the guys in the US unis are doing something similar.
10. devo said...
Were our big banks run by psychopaths?
A psychologist suggests that the banks' current woes may be due to their bosses' psychopathic tendencies...
The level of recklessness and overweening ambition that has brought Britain’s biggest banks to their knees suggests that their bosses could have been affected by anti-social psychopathic personality traits, according to business psychologist Professor Binna Kandola. So watching Sir Fred Goodwin and co. appear in front of the Treasury Select Committee recently, the professor was not surprised (albeit distinctly unimpressed) by their refusal to accept any personal responsibility for the crisis, despite their ‘heartfelt’ apologies.
Of course when we talk about banking bosses being psychopaths, we’re not actually using it in the popular sense, i.e. that they went around slaughtering people American-Psycho-style (although we’d be slightly nervous about bumping into a recently-axed CEO in a dark alley). We’re talking about the clinical condition, which is usually characterised by an almost total lack of empathy.
Public trust has been eroded to such an extent that from now on, leaders will have to operate very differently – notably, they’ll have to be much more honest and open with people, and they’ll have to get used to much more scrutiny of their decisions. ‘It won’t just be about track records,’ says Kandola. ‘It’ll be about how they achieved what they did.’ In other words, psychopaths need not apply.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/883246/were-big-banks-run-psychopaths/
11. Charlie White said...
The banksters got so out of control because the UK has become a one-industry town, with that one industry running riot with nobody daring to even try to bring it under some kind of reasonable control. We MUST develop a much broader & more diverse economy. The City should be one important part of a much wider economic spectrum, instead of being the WHOLE spectrum. That would automatically introduce a level of sanity that is currently completely absent. The whole thing is very depressing. And extremely scary.
12. shipbuilder said...
When the signs of sociopathy were aligned with the required attitude for 'success' as they were over the past decade, these people and their politician friends, the spin generation, did not look out of place.
Now they can be seen for who they are and their hubris becomes increasingly apparent and increasingly nauseating with each utterance. They are incapable now of covering up their true selves, so the question now is, what is the breaking point for the public?
13. icarus said...
Trade unions do what they do because they are relatively powerless. The real decision-makers are much better organised. The latter can choose de-industrialisation and financialisation and thus pull the rug from under the feet of the unions.
Psychopathology is a minor, derivative cause. A more 'structural' cause is the implicit state backing for banks that has increased over the last two centuries and this obviously increases the incentive for risk-taking. Until the early 1970 UK banks' balance sheets were about 50% of GDP, by 2007 they were 500+%, all backed up by the state. Did the banks self-insure by holding greater buffers of liquidity and capital? Nope, both have fallen dramatically. Banks have become inherently more risky and returns to shareholders more volatile over the last few decades - during which state-backing has risen dramatically in both degree and the kinds of support available. (And of course shareholders have required greater returns to compensate for balance-sheet fragility.)
14. devo said...
11. icarus said... Psychopathology is a minor, derivative cause
Can you expand on this?
I think you are wrong, but I have perhaps misunderstood you.
15. icarus said...
I don't think you can explain the increase in risk-taking by an increase in psychopathology. You have to look at the kind of thing I outlined @11. You have to ask what are the circumstances under which psychopaths get to run the show.
16. mr g said...
"But Mr Scargill was arguing for decent miners’ wages,"
Absolute tosh.
Scargill couldn't have given a sh*t for the miners, they were just his shock troops in his deluded attempt to overthrow an elected government, which is unacceptable, whether you hated that government or not.
17. devo said...
icarus
It's something of a chicken and egg question... which came first, the psychopaths or the system in which they can operate?
A commentator on the article I referred to above made a valid point...
The big problem with psychopaths is that they’re drawn to both business and politics like wasps to jam. They thrive because normal co-operative types struggle to compete with their ruthlessness. Though their excessive risk-taking inevitably brings the occasional eye-catching success, they tend to leave a trail of destruction behind them that the rest have to clear up. And though they’re a minority, it’s an institutional problem.
John Bunyard 24-Feb-09, 16:07
18. devo said...
14. mr g
Scargill wasn't trying to overthrow the government; he was fighting pit closures and job losses.
He failed abysmally.
19. mr g said...
Devo @16
With respect, I beg to differ.
I know a number of people who worked in the pits in Yorkshire and they now have a different view of 1984 / 85.
Yes, some of the leaders of the NUM were genuinely fighting pit closures and job losses but this was merely a pretext for Scargill with his delusions of political power.
For your information, I also think that Thatcher and Heseltine were deluded in destroying the mining industry!
20. devo said...
@17. mr g said... this was merely a pretext for Scargill with his delusions of political power.
Once we start talking about pretexts, we are guessing.
The facts remain that the dispute set community against community, family against family and even family member against family member.
The government then went on to destroy the mining industry in this country.
21. drewster said...
It's an interesting post by Greg, it certainly merits thought.
In the early 1980s the coalmines simply weren't profitable. Too many miners, not enough coal demand. Here's a graph of UK coal production. You can see there's a dip for the 1984-5 miners' strike, but it was part of a long-term decline in coal usage. Our coal consumption today is less than half of what it was pre-1984, largely due to the arrival of North Sea oil & gas. Unlike the coalmines, the north sea oil-rigs never needed government subsidy.
At the same time, new technology was making miners redundant across the world. Here are some graphs from the USA, showing how productivity (tons of coal extracted per worker) has improved dramatically since 1980. The productivity improvements are largely down to technology. In the UK, miners' unions resisted new technologies because they would have made many miners redundant. (A union's raison d'être is first and foremost to protect its members.)